


for you i hold my breath

by luvbound444



Category: Secret History - Donna Tartt
Genre: F/F, also tw 4 d-slur !, camilla-centric ଘ(੭ˊ꒳ˋ)੭✧, from th prehistoric era .. :0, lesbian camilla :-), this is more of a character study rather than a pocket of luv :p, tw 4 alcohol abuse !
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-27
Updated: 2021-02-27
Packaged: 2021-03-18 07:36:20
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 878
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29730537
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/luvbound444/pseuds/luvbound444
Summary: And still she remembers—the moon, its waifish sickle, a strip of rotten god-teeth when the curtains battered the walls; a curl, a dark awry ringlet by Maddie’s cheek, so dark and so beguiling that her fingers dug the suggestion of crescents into her palms and her very ribs throbbed.
Relationships: Camilla Macaulay/Judy Poovey, Camilla Macaulay/Original Female Character(s)
Comments: 1
Kudos: 8





	for you i hold my breath

**Author's Note:**

> ✧ʚ .·:*¨༺♡༻¨*:·. ɞ✧

An uncanny sort of sickness dwells at the bottom of her stomach when she counts on her fingers how many girls she has kissed. Camilla is not known to get drunk often; or most frankly, if you will, she is not known for anything beyond the daunt of her beauty or the thread of her twinship or the white pleats of her skirt. But she is drunk tonight, and she wishes she never fucking uncapped the bottle, because drunkenness is honesty is foul filthy dirt. 

The first time was ninth grade. Maddie was really the only friend she’d ever had in high school apart from Charles, and Maddie was really the only friend she’d ever had at all; the other girls thought Camilla a bitch, a stuck-up bitch too pretty for her own good, and in her grey-tipsy gospel now, she knows they are right. They were always right. It was a sleepover, on a Friday, in a sweet October, the sweet lovely October of her heart. 

And here, over the punch of time, is where strings tangle. Had it been Whitney Houston frothing from the radio, or had it been Belinda Carlisle? Had the lip gloss been strawberry, or had it been bubblegum? Had it been midnight, or had she swallowed herself down to bones and heart, spurted ruse all over her patent want, her bright Earth-blue ache? Stupid question: bubblegum. Stupid: she had never forgotten. 

And still she remembers—the moon, its waifish sickle, a strip of rotten god-teeth when the curtains battered the walls; a curl, a dark awry ringlet by Maddie’s cheek, so dark and so beguiling that her fingers dug the suggestion of crescents into her palms and her very ribs throbbed; wand of lip gloss, tube half-empty;  _ you’re so pretty _ ;  _ no,  _ you _ are _ ; Maddie, Mads, Madeleine; Maddie’s breath stuttering on her lips;  _ I thought you liked Joshua I didn’t know you were a well nevermind I’m feeling sick I think you should call your Nana I think you should go I think you should call Charles _ ; a beat, a drum-beat, a dream-beat, a heartbeat; avid, the ghastly knife of teenage heartbreak; the blood in her mouth.

There is that one lyric of that one song from that one woman: heaven is a place, heaven on earth, heaven is a place with you, that mind-numbing bullshit. The bottom of the bottle, now, tempts her twice as much as the light high and maddeningly silken on Maddie’s dear tawny cheek, the grievous thwack of bubblegum between two lips and teeth.  _ Dykes don’t go to heaven _ , she thinks, and the bottom of the bottle nears closer, and her chest plunges awfully with the laugh of somebody who does not find the joke funny. 

There are many dykes like Camilla Macaulay. Dykes like the stuck-up bitch, the one who hangs around all those boys, all those fucking boys, and can’t stomach the thought of bedding a single one of them. Dykes like the stuck-up bitch, the one who saw her very best friend in star-sent light, with an anti-halo, and thought  _ God I want to kiss her _ . Dykes like the stuck-up bitch who thinks  _ I’m a dyke I’m a dyke fuck it I’m a dyke _ when she gets drunk (which is rarely) but tried to say  _ I’m a lesbian _ at three in the morning in the hotel bathroom and then threw up her dinner (which was once).

The second girl does not have a name; or rather, not a name that Camilla knows of, but she looked appallingly like a Mary, like a pure clean pristine Virgin Mary, which she could not be if she kissed a girl,  _ girl-kisser girl-kisser girl-kisser my liquor-stained lipstick haunts you I’m a fucking ghost this soon will kill me _ , so then probably she was not. Paltry does Camilla remember the specifics of her—painful burst of butter-blonde; dim Helen-of-Troy eyes; starlit dimple on the right; moony, stained mouth—but she remembers the few seconds before and after.

“I never pinned you as—” loose gesture; surely, she meant a semi-crude variation of  _ sapphic _ —“if you know what I—?”

“God, just don’t tell anybody. Please.”

“You and that Winter guy,” said Maybe Mary-Helen, and scrunched up her eyes, “we all thought you—”

Here, Camilla had stood, to don Charles’s coat from senior year, and to leave. To go home over it. “Think it. I don’t much care, really,” but the lie, there, was salt on her tongue, and the enormity of it all is burgeoning and even so she is aflame with the big bleak desire she will leave in her pocket to dry. The pillowtalk, to this day, is the softest thing Camilla knows. 

And then there were three. 

And as a matter of fact, she does know this girl’s name, for almost everybody does. Unbound hair of nutmeg, a peart, red-brown cloud about her shoulders; a laugh spun bell-red and ruly in the distance. Of the three pairs of lips Camilla has met, of the three silent sins she has performed, of the three curses she has planted and let blossom, Judy Poovey she never might have forecasted. 

For it was so marvellous and criminal, and Judy was so true, and Camilla looks forward to the bottom of the bottle.

  
  


**Author's Note:**

> titled 4 one of my fav evr songs from lalleshwari (katie jane garside) .. <3 furthermore i hope u hve a lovely day nd if not i hope tomorrow is kinder ! ✧༺ ༒ ༻✧


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